Nero was a boy emperor, eased on to the throne by his mum. Rumours were that he'd had necesstuos, an incestuous affair with mum. He decides he has to get rid of her, and he has her killed. And one ancient story is that after, after the death, he sends in the hit squad. But later ages, actually, from the mediaeval period, really up to the mid twentieth ry, they find nero because of the specific crimes that he was supposed to have committed. The only people who are left are his faithful female servants who take this still young emperor away to burial. There's a rebellion against him in 68.
What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of figures we deplore? In October 2021 Mary Beard, Britain’s best known classicist, came to Intelligence Squared to talk about the ideas in her new book Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern.
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